Bowerman and the Men of Oregon Read online

  Jayne and Sally looked at each other and shrieked, “He’s our brother! We got a brother! We gotta meet him!”

  Jay, ambushed, had no choice. So, on a subsequent Friday his son came to dinner. And all apprehensions evaporated. “Bill was never anything but darling to me,” Jayne recalled. “I felt he was this big star, but he asked if I’d like to go to lunch with him the next day, before their game. I almost swooned at the thought, but yes I sure could, and there we met some other godlike football players and he introduced me as his sister!” Bill loved the idea of having brand-new sisters. He, Sally, and Jayne became lifelong friends, even though Bill made no move to improve relations with his father.

  Bill poured all these events into his letters to Barbara, including a clipping of the December 1930 story noting that he had won, by a technical knockout, the university’s light heavyweight boxing championship.

  The house on Fifteenth was becoming a little fraternity of its own. In the basement, in this Prohibitive era, a substance was mellowing intended to induce even greater brotherhood. One day the Teutonic lady from whom they rented walked by, stopped to converse with Bill on the sidewalk, and picked up a certain aroma. “If someone would just ask,” the landlady said, as Bill was trying to sidle away, “I could teach someone how to make good beer.” Bill sidled back

  “And,” as Barbara Bowerman would recount, “she proceeded to do so. Bill enjoyed chemistry and things like that almost as much as the home-brew reward at the end of it all.” His desire to go to med school arose, Barbara felt, from a sense that “medicine was this grand combination of chemistry and PE.”

  The young Barbara Young, meanwhile, was adjusting to life in California. The Youngs had first moved to Westwood Village, near UCLA, where her father plunged gratefully back into high-end real estate. Barbara went to huge Beverly Hills High, where, she would recall, “nobody spoke to me the whole term.” But it was not in Barbara’s nature to sustain a mope. Slowly, the glories of where she was wore her down: “My family were always great driver-arounders. We drove to the beach and felt that ocean. We went to the desert when the flowers bloomed. My brother Jack and I did love that.”

  A year later, they moved east to Monrovia, where she fit in fine among the 400 students at Monrovia Arcadia Duarte High. She even took up with a football player. “He was neither an intellect nor from a good background,” she would confess, “but basically I didn’t want to be lonely ever again.”

  Her social possibilities skyrocketed the next year when Ernest Young discovered an estate in Covina, a hacienda with a red-tiled roof, persimmon trees, pool, barbecue pit, sixteen acres of orange groves, and a tennis court with a double row of roses all around it. They couldn’t really afford it, but her father had gotten a great deal on the estate (“so he called it an investment”) and they found people to live in the carriage house and take care of the place. Barbara was just starting at UCLA, and the hacienda was perfect for parties.

  By then Barbara had been seduced by the new land. “I’d fallen in love with the nights of Southern California,” she would sigh, remembering. “The stars . . . And the orange blossoms were so fragrant.” It didn’t take long before romance was of a different odor.

  Lit by the glow of a huge bonfire at a pep rally the Thursday before the homecoming football game, the incandescent face of Barbara Young struck UCLA quarterback Mike Frankovich dumb. But not for long. Frankovich recovered, made an inspiring speech promising victory or death, then shoved through the cheers to make sure this blinding vision didn’t escape again. He’d actually seen her before, when he had come to pick up one of her sorority sisters at the Tri-Delt house. When Barbara opened the door, Frankovich had grabbed her hand and said, “Where did you come from?” But she had torn free and retrieved his date for him.

  Now she was trapped. They stayed the night at the dying bonfire, comparing their origins and family histories, and watched the sunrise while talking about their dreams.

  Barbara returned to the house neck deep in what would become the quandary of her life. She was tremendously attracted to Frankovich. In strength and declarative sentences, in appetite and boldness, he was a match for Bill Bowerman. Football quarterback and a catcher on the baseball team, Frankovich was also a star in the UCLA drama and radio departments. He was handsome, hardworking, and so exemplary that he had been adopted by comedian Joe E. Brown to be a live-in role model for Brown’s own kids. The Browns encouraged Frankovich and Barbara’s friendship, and soon she was a member of the family.

  Joe E. Brown, of course, is immortal for uttering the last line in Some Like It Hot. When Jack Lemmon rips off his wig and says, “The reason I can’t marry you is I’m a MAN!,” the lascivious, undeterred Brown replies, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

  Even though that triumph lay thirty years in the future, Brown was already someone who could open every studio door to his ward. Frankovich would go on to have a producing career worthy of such a launching pad, working with David Lean on The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia and becoming head of Columbia Pictures. Even at twenty-one, he was sure such achievements lay ahead and he wanted Barbara to experience it all at his side.

  Decades later, Barbara would reserve a special tone of voice for discussion of her most intimate topics or moments. She would use it with interviewer Bill Landers when she whispered, “I got in a little over my head.”

  She had told Mike all about Bill, but it would be two years before she told Bill all about Mike. At first, she didn’t think this was any great betrayal. But time passed and she still couldn’t choose. “I felt so conflicted,” Barbara would remember at eighty, “that I hoped some third person, some even shinier knight would come riding in and carry me off, to solve this thing.”

  None did, so Frankovich, knowing that UCLA would play Oregon in Portland, sought to have the outcome really mean something. “If we win, if I beat Bill, will you marry me?” he asked. Barbara gave him an answer after the team had gone up to Portland. “I sent Mike a telegram saying I’d marry the winner,” Barbara would blush to confess, adding, “I thought Oregon would win!” When it came down to it, she couldn’t bear to watch, so she stayed in Los Angeles.

  Jayne Bowerman, then fifteen, got her parents to invite Bill to dinner in Portland the night before the game. All were astounded when Bill walked in with the opposing quarterback. Although the two were equally magnetic to Barbara, they were temperamental opposites. As Jayne would put it, “Mike is a passer, an initiator. Bill is more of a catcher, a responder.” Mike entertained everyone so thoroughly that Jayne could remember her own reaction vividly: “I hated that man because he hogged the limelight.”

  For Bill’s father the attorney, this was a chance to see his son tested off the playing field. He had to be impressed. In quietly sitting back and beaming while Frankovich performed, Bill might have been following a script by Machiavelli. He already knew to keep his friends close and his enemies closer—where he could study them at will. Not for the first time, nor the last, Bill was doing recon.

  The game itself was a brutal defensive struggle. Oregon led 7-3 with five seconds left, and UCLA was backed up on its own twenty-five-yard line. Bill, playing defense against Frankovich’s final, Hail Mary pass, leaped, batted the ball away from the UCLA receiver, thought it hit the turf, but turned to see it drop into the hands of a second Bruin, who sprinted away from the fallen Bill to score. UCLA had won, 9-7.

  But had Frankovich? When Bill called Barbara and told her the score, she cried out as if struck. Bill wondered why she was taking his loss so hard, but she couldn’t bear to tell him. Ultimately, she couldn’t bear to lose him and climbed back up on the fence.

  Frankovich, however, was prepared to declare it to high heaven. As Barbara would tell it years later, “I thought Mike would keep the telegram under his hat, but no, that wasn’t his way. Both Mr. Brown and Mike were always telling the papers about Mike, which was why the thing blew out of control.”

  Frankovich, a natural pub
lic persona, had no qualms about publishing her vow, even if she wasn’t keeping it. “It was in the UCLA Daily Bruin that I’d promised to marry the winning quarterback. There was even a song about it, a phonograph record, which I later threw in the trash.”

  Bill, somehow spared hearing about all this, returned to what was becoming a mixed bag of studies. At the urging of the chemistry dean, he had taken physics and biology and found them so absorbing he began to think seriously of medical school. (He would actually end up a PE major, but with minors in journalism, business, and pre-med.)

  Bowerman signed up for one other class, public speaking from Professor Glenn Starlin. Barbara had often teased Bill about how, when he was on the honor roll back in Medford, he’d stand up with the team at pep rallies and—when asked for a few stirring words—would say, “Do our best,” and look at his feet.

  Always a lover of stories, Bill had an ear for the ring and richness of language, from the barnyard to the chapel. Under Starlin’s guidance, he quickly grew eloquent before a group, becoming a weaver of narratives with riveting beginnings, hysterical middles, and bewildering ends.

  Barbara, who would hear these yarns in the years to come, was becoming a sophisticated audience. She majored in English, to one day write, but freely sampled other disciplines and found she liked philosophy. If she hoped to find something to soothe her conscience for allowing her two suitors to dangle on and on, she searched in vain. Even Gandhi had no advice for a woman with two irresistible forces trying to conquer her.

  CHAPTER 6

  Bill Hayward

  AFTER THE DISASTROUS UCLA GAME, BILL LED THE DUCKS TO A 14-6 UPSET OF New York University, wrecking the Violets’ hope of a national championship. Yet, as hard as he could hit, Bill had no wish to maim. And it seemed that everywhere he looked he saw carnage caused by his football coach being utterly and stupidly brutal.

  Bill Hayward shared Bill Bowerman’s view of Spears. Assistant trainer Bob “Two Gun” Officer once watched Hayward tenderly tape the separated shoulder of a halfback named Watts. Then Hayward walked Watts out to the field, flagged down Spears and told him, “No contact for Watts.” Hayward came back to the training room and had barely sat down when Watts clattered in, bug-eyed from pain, his shoulder sticking out at a horrifying angle. Watts said Spears had put him in as soon as Hayward’s back was turned.

  After practice, Hayward told Officer, “I’m going up to see our great ‘doctor,’” and mounted the steps to the coach’s office. Officer heard a knock, Spears’s muffled roaring, a sharp crack, then silence. In a minute Hayward came back in, rubbing his hand.

  “Got any ice?” he said.

  William Louis Hayward was born on July 2, 1868, in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest son of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Heyward. (Hayward would change the spelling when he came West, arguing, irresistibly, “You spell hay ‘H-A-Y,’ don’t you?”) The family was Roman Catholic, of French Canadian descent, and lived in a large house on the edge of town. Hayward’s earliest memory placed him in the lap of richly deserved attention.

  “When I was five,” he once told an interviewer, “I had nice, rosy cheeks and all the pretty girls used to make quite a fuss over me.” In grade school, he was outgoing and competitive. “If a boy at school lifted some big weight, I’d lift a bigger one,” he recalled. “I got a great bang out of robbing birds’ nests and helping myself to other people’s apples.”

  A gong of similarity with Bill Bowerman sounds here and never quite fades. Bowerman, too, would crow of winning a beautiful-baby contest. A signal parallel was their sparse fathering. When he was ten, Hayward’s parents took off to Peru to run a rubber plantation and never came home. Hayward, his three sisters, and an older brother were taken in by their grandparents and raised in Toronto, Canada.

  Hayward was bright but tempted away from studying by all things physical. At twenty he was six feet and 190 pounds and had mastered lacrosse so well that he played for a championship team, the Ottawa Capitals. But his genuine gift was the ability to lift those knees and fly. In the early 1890s he prospered as a professional sprinter. While traveling on a summer Caledonian Sports circuit that began in Rochester, New York, and ended in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Hayward once won five races in one day, at 75, 135, 300, 400, and 600 yards.

  He had phenomenal incentive. Hayward’s winnings topped $4,000 per meet, which accustomed him to his first fine clothes and exquisite fly rods. It would be ninety years before there was a better time to sprint for money. Before 1896 there was no modern Olympics to ban professionals. Neither did Hayward’s earnings disqualify him from other amateur sports. Summers, he played lacrosse and rowed. Winters, he boxed, wrestled, and played hockey.

  Hayward competed across the American West, and Bowerman recalled his telling of a match race in Spokane. Hayward had acquired a great prize—one of the first pairs of spiked shoes ever made. He didn’t want the sight of them to prejudice the betting, so he warmed up with tall, striped socks covering their soles. These he whipped off at the start and won easily, dust rising, spectators’ jaws dropping.

  When his speed began to ebb, Hayward turned more fully to the sweet science, honing the punch he would use to such effect upon Doc Spears. He fought exhibitions with heavyweight champ “Gentleman Jim” Corbett until Britain’s Bob Fitzsimmons took the title from him in 1897. Corbett then invited Hayward, a natural showman, to be part of a barnstorming vaudeville company.

  One time, while training in Vallejo, California, Hayward was asked to spar with another contender, “Sailor” Jack Sharkey, from whom Hayward extracted a promise not to start slugging. But Sharkey immediately started swinging from his heels and wouldn’t lay off despite Hayward’s warnings. As Hayward would tell the story, “I reached behind me with one hand, picked up a baseball bat that was in a corner, and when he came after me I cracked him over the head—hard. He stopped all right, but he just shook his head and started swinging again. I wasn’t around by then. I’d hit him and ducked out of the ring at the same time.” Speed saves. And teaching speed would be the key to Hayward’s life’s work.

  Hayward essentially started track coaching at the top. When a friend, world champion sprinter Walter Christie, became track coach at Princeton, he summoned Hayward to assist. The duo worked there for three seasons before being enticed away by the University of California at Berkeley, where they got a sluggish team rocketing. This was not lost on other schools. In 1901, Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, lured him north. Hayward was pulled, as if by a Royal Coachman in his cheek, to Oregon’s fly-fishing. “I came for a vacation,” he would say, “and caught what they called the Oregon spirit. It’s not serious, but it is contagious so they kept me here. I like everything in the state and everything I like is in the state so I stayed.”

  In 1903, an even smaller Willamette Valley college, Albany, hired Hayward away. He coaxed from its hundred-member student body a team that embarrassed the University of Oregon, a behemoth at three times that number. This had to stop, declared Virgil D. Earl, student manager of the Oregon track team (and later dean of students; Earl Hall bears his name). Earl overstepped his authority and hired Hayward in late 1903. It wasn’t hard. “Wasn’t Eugene nearer the McKenzie River, the greatest fishing stream in the world?” Earl would say.

  At Oregon, Hayward coached and taught gym to both men and women and doted on his first wife and mother of his son, William Hayward Jr. Along about 1910, the first Mrs. Hayward, always a frail woman, died at an early age. The vagueness is because Hayward declared his personal life off-limits to all interviewers. Hayward grieved in silence and coached on. Never again would he consider changing schools.

  In 1921, at age fifty-three, he married Bertina Orton, daughter of a prominent Eugene family. Their union sustained Hayward throughout his long life. After the overworked coach had a heart attack at seventy-one in 1939 (“I knew it was do or die against Oregon State,” Hayward cracked in the hospital. “And I damn near died.”), Bertina doubled her efforts for his comfort and
protection. He would coach another eight years.

  We dilute the word and usually demean the subject when we call someone a character. But Hayward’s eccentricity invited it, and he didn’t seem to mind. A true boxer, he loved cars, clothes, and monikers. Known as Blackjack in his running days, he later switched to Colonel to impress carnival crowds. He had never been in the service, but Colonel grew so natural he used it when signing the title page of an Oregon graduate student’s thesis (which was titled “The Life and Times of Colonel William Hayward”).

  Hayward wasn’t especially fatherly toward his charges and treated each one differently, characteristics Bill Bowerman would emulate. Hayward also preceded Bowerman in being a practical joker, and his habitual deadpan remark over a painful limb was “If it’s bothering you, cut it off.” The day Hayward complained of a headache, half the team shot back, “If it’s bothering you, cut it off!”

  When Bill met him in 1929, Hayward had coached several men of Oregon in four Olympics. He’d paid his own fare to London in 1908 to accompany versatile Dan Kelly, who’d tied the 9.6-second world record for the 100-yard dash. Kelly didn’t make the final in the 100 meters but took the silver medal in the long jump, and Hayward was immediately pressed into service with the US team.

  Hayward brought back a fine new camera, a trunk full of photos, and a pair of English waders that allowed him to drop a fly above the noses of more McKenzie trout. All his life, he held it truly, honestly immoral to fish with bait or lure.

  At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Hayward was the official US track coach, guiding such talents as decathlon champion Jim Thorpe. “Meeting King Gustave when he awarded the medals,” Hayward would tell Bowerman, “destroyed my illusions of the grandeur of nobility. Terrible posture. Twelve-dollar suit. Buck-and-a-half straw hat.” Sharing the ship home with Douglas Fairbanks and Gloria Swanson was more Hayward’s style.